Strong quake frightens people across southern Mexico; no deaths reported

MEXICO CITY -- A strong earthquake swayed tall buildings from Acapulco to Mexico City early Friday, jolting people awake and sending many fleeing to spend the rest of the night outside.

The country escaped the magnitude-6 quake with no deaths or widespread destruction, but several apartment buildings in Mexico City were evacuated and inspected for possible structural damage.

The quake knocked out power to 20 percent of the capital's center, provoking scattered water and gas leaks and sending fissures through building facades, national Civil Protection Director Laura Gurza told a news conference.

At the high-rise, beachside Fairmont Acapulco Princess Hotel, hundreds of guests rushed outside, huddling on deck chairs as security officials used megaphones to urge them to remain calm.

"We flew out of bed. The building was shaking," said Marcy Olsen, 41, a gas station manager from Minnesota on vacation with her family. "I said, 'I think this has to be an earthquake.' We looked out the door, and everyone was leaving."

One five-story residential building in Mexico City leaned precariously, and another, graffiti-covered apartment complex was riddled with fissures.

Some two dozen families from the two buildings spent the night in the street or in their cars. One person was injured falling down stairs trying to get outside.

Alfredo Sanchez, a 37-year-old construction worker renovating a century-old house in downtown Mexico City, was awoken by shouts from his co-workers to take refuge under the concrete beams they had just installed.

"When I was lying down, I didn't feel it so much, but as soon as I got up, I felt it," said Sanchez, who stood outside on the sidewalk with his workmates after the temblor. "For our own safety, we got out."

Gurza said there were at least nine aftershocks before dawn, including a magnitude-5.4 tremor felt throughout much of southern Mexico and Mexico City.

At the quake's epicenter, about 40 miles northwest of the Pacific resort city of Acapulco, several adobe houses were seriously damaged, while one person fell inside a factory and suffered minor injuries, Gurza said.

About 200 people in the town of Hacienda de Cabanas were forced to evacuate their homes after the quake broke open containers of chlorine at a nearby water purification plant, local authorities said.

About 100 people from one community near Acapulco were evacuated to a park after a nearby water treatment plant reported a chlorine leak, civil protection official Nadia Vela said.

Power had been restored to most of Acapulco and Mexico City by Friday afternoon, and gas and water leaks were being repaired.

The quake, which hit at 12:42 a.m. local time was felt strongly because it was centered inland and just 18 miles below the earth's surface, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

Many of Mexico's earthquakes are centered out in the Pacific. Gerard Fryer of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said Friday's quake was too small and too far inland to produce a tsunami.

Mexico's Pacific coast is located along a major fault line where scientists have been warning for some time that a great deal of seismic energy was building, foreshadowing the possibility of a larger quake.

Gurza said Friday's quake was good because it released some of that energy, but it would take "several dozen more releases" of the same intensity to disperse it all.

Mexico City was built on a sandy, former lake bed that shifts and shimmies, magnifying earthquakes.

Mexico experiences several earthquakes every day, most of them relatively small.